Why Paying Attention to One Thing Is the Only Path to Excellence
If you've been busy all day but still feel behind, this is for you.
Little is known about Ruiyan Shiyan 瑞巖師彥, a Zen master who lived in the late 9th and early 10th centuries.
He is best remembered for a strange daily ritual: he talked to himself.
In the early 13th century, the Chinese monk Wumen 無門 gathered 48 Zen koans into a book called The Gateless Gate. Ruiyan's conversation is one of them.
Case 12: Ruiyan Calls the Master
Every day Ruiyan would call to himself, "Master, Master!"
And every day he would respond, "Yes, yes."
Then he would say, "Be awake! Be alert!"
"Yes!"
"From now on, don't be fooled by anything."
"No, I won't be!"
Wumen's commentary on this koan suggests Ruiyan speaks from two perspectives: Self and non-Self.
Self is the one who pays attention. Non-Self is whatever pulls that attention away.
When Ruiyan gets distracted, he calls to the Master (Self) to take his attention back.
That points to a deeper truth in this koan:
You cannot be Self and non-Self at the same time.
Either you're fully engaged with the moment in front of you, or you're distracted by your thoughts, emotions or senses.
If you're in a conversation and your mind wanders to what you said before, you are distracted by your thoughts.
If you're working and your heart clenches with anxiety about the future, you are distracted by your emotions.
If you're lifting and your eyes drift to your neighbor, you are distracted by your senses.
You're either paying attention, or you're distracted.
We live in an age where we try to squeeze every last drop out of our attention. We think the better we are at giving our attention to everything, the more results we'll get.
But the more I study the best in any field, the more I see the opposite.
Those who produce the most valuable work have an extraordinary ability to redirect their attention to one thing.
Why Science Says You Cannot Pay Attention to Two Things at Once
Attention is the ability to direct your awareness.
You can divide your awareness across many things. But you can only pay attention to one.
You can eat while watching TV. You can walk while talking. You can read while listening to music. But your mind cannot direct its complete awareness to both tasks at the same time.1
Every time you try to divide your attention, it flickers back and forth between tasks. We call this multitasking, and it carries a switching cost: the mental toll of dropping one task and rebuilding your attention on another.23 It makes deep thinking impossible.
Johns Hopkins psychologist Steven Yantis explained it this way:
The term 'multitasking' is misleading. With rare exceptions, people don't carry out two (or more) tasks literally at the same time; they switch between them, and each switch takes time... In addition to the switch cost, each time you switch away from a task and back again, you have to recall where you were in that task, what you were thinking about.4
This gets worse with complex work. Say you're reading a dense article and you switch to check email. When you return, you've forgotten a key point. Now you have to re-read the paragraph you just finished.
A 2003 study of employees at the Danwood Group in the UK showed how costly this is. The average employee checked email once every five minutes. After each interruption, it took 64 seconds to get back to work.5
Think about that. If you check email as often as they did, you lose 64 seconds every five minutes. That's over 12 minutes an hour, just from email.
And email is only one task. Every task you add to your day means more switching, and every switch has a cost.
Constant switching doesn't just slow you down. It trains your brain to expect interruption. You perform worse on every task. You waste time getting back to work. And you never reach sustained deep focus.
Why Shallow Attention Produces Shallow Work
Doing more things does not create better results. Doing fewer things better does.
There's a difference between being busy and being effective. You can signal to others how "hard" you work by juggling many tasks. But the most valuable skills are learned through focus and consistency, not shallow attention across many tasks.
Bestselling author Nicholas Carr puts it this way:
Our most valuable mental habits – the habits of deep and focused thought – must be learned, and the way we learn them is by practicing them, regularly and attentively. And that's what our continuously connected, constantly distracted lives are stealing from us.6
When your attention is fragmented, your work suffers. You skim instead of study. You dabble instead of build.
A 2008 University College London report found that even academic researchers had shifted toward "power browsing" instead of careful reading.7 Shallow attention, at every level, produces shallow work.
We've fallen into a trap as a society. We've mistaken "busy" for "valuable." That confusion is why we take on too much and struggle to say no.
Busy keeps us from learning new things. It keeps us from getting better at what we already do. But meaning comes from contributing something of value. Value requires mastery. And mastery requires a narrow focus.
One Theme, One Priority
You cannot produce excellence if you dilute your attention.
The more you take on, the less you give to each task.
You can either give 5 tasks 20% of your attention, or 1 task 100%. And once you count the cost of every switch, those 5 tasks don't even get 20%.
Some days you'll reach all your goals, but many days you'll have bandwidth for only one.
You must pick one priority and protect it daily.
Here's how I do it.
I use a simple two-part system I call One Theme, One Priority:
- One theme per quarter: One clear area to develop (a skill, project or goal).
- One priority per day: The non-negotiable action that moves the theme forward.
Everything else stays in maintenance mode.
As a junior doctor, one priority a day put me in the 99th percentile on medical boards. As a writer, it means writing every day to publish on schedule.
One priority does something powerful: it becomes an anchor. When the day gets chaotic, you don't negotiate with yourself. You return to the one thing you already decided matters.
Without that anchor, everything will compete for your attention.
If you commit to one thing and do it as well as you can, you'll drive your greatest results.
To quote Bruce Lee:
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.8
So ask yourself:
What do you want to master?
What's the one priority that anchors your day?
What are you willing to say no to, so you can do one thing well?
And when you feel the pull to split your attention, remember:
You're either paying attention, or you're distracted.
Thank you for reading.
Sources
- Harold Pashler. "Dual-task interference in simple tasks: data and theory." Psychological Bulletin 116(2) (1994): 220–244. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.2.220 ↩
- Joshua S. Rubinstein, David E. Meyer, Jeffrey E. Evans. "Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 27(4) (2001): 763–797. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11518143/ ↩
- Stephen Monsell. "Task switching." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(3) (2003): 134–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00028-7 ↩
- Steven Yantis, in "First Steps to Digital Detox." Room for Debate, The New York Times, June 7, 2010. https://archive.nytimes.com/roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/first-steps-to-digital-detox/ ↩
- Thomas Jackson, Ray Dawson, Darren Wilson. "Understanding email interaction increases organizational productivity." Communications of the ACM 46(8) (August 2003). https://cacm.acm.org/research/understanding-email-interaction-increases-organizational-productivity ↩
- Nicholas Carr. "Steven Pinker and the Internet." Rough Type (June 12, 2010). https://www.roughtype.com/?p=1392 ↩
- CIBER, University College London. Information behaviour of the researcher of the future: a CIBER briefing paper (commissioned by the British Library and JISC, January 2008). http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf ↩
- Bethania Palma. "Did Bruce Lee Say This About the Value of Practice?" Snopes (Feb 19, 2022). https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/02/19/bruce-lee-value-of-practice/ ↩